Trudi C. Miller died on September 30, 2003, after a brief illness. After earning a BA in English from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she spent most of her career at the National Science Foundation. After a brief stay at the State University of New York at Buffalo, she moved to NSF, where she rose to be the program director for the Decision, Risk and Management Division of Social and Economic Science.
She won three prestigious awards in our profession. In 1989/90 Trudi won the Marshall E. Dimock Award for the best lead article in the Public Administration Review for “The Operation of Democratic Institutions.” In 1989 she won the Policy Studies Organization's award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting for “Designing Social Structures: A Scientific Perspective.” And in 1981 she won the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper at the APSA meeting for “Toward a Normative Dynamic Model for Educational Equity.” In addition, she published many articles in books and refereed journals, including Politics and the Life Sciences, Journal of Theoretical Politics, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, and The American Political Science Review.
Trudi Miller was a committed scholar who kept learning and writing until the end. She was always inclined to question and challenge conventional academic wisdom. A long-term project had been a book manuscript entitled Democracy, Markets, and Money, which she completed shortly before her death.
Trudi took great joy in family and friends. She is survived by her beloved husband, Ettore (Jim) Infante, and his family. She took care of her parents and her mother-in-law until they died, and Jim took care of her in her illness. Trudi Miller is greatly missed.
